


My Name is Rey, I come from Jakku

by TehanuFromEarthsea



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-26
Updated: 2016-03-26
Packaged: 2018-05-29 07:55:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6365620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TehanuFromEarthsea/pseuds/TehanuFromEarthsea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What was Rey's life like on Jakku?</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Name is Rey, I come from Jakku

My name is Rey, and I’m from Jakku.

That’s two things I know for sure, so that’s what I say when anybody asks me.

Of course, nobody’s really from Jakku. It’s not the kind of place people usually live in. Hardly any water, and you can’t grow food. If it weren’t for the war, all of us at Niima Outpost wouldn’t be here.

But there was a war, a big one, before I was born. One of the big battles was fought above Jakku, and so many starships crashed onto the surface that it’s given us a lifetime of work scavenging for all that valuable technology. And that’s why most people came here. If you’re prepared to work, you never need to go very hungry on Jakku. I’ve heard that people on other planets aren’t as lucky as us.

So, like everyone else here I came from somewhere else. My people left me here, where I would be safe. One day they’ll come back for me. I guess things aren’t safe out there yet. Meanwhile I say I’m Rey, from Jakku, until I find out where I really come from.

I’m definitely very lucky that I was left with Unkar Plutt. People laugh when I say that, because he’s so mean. But I’ve thought about this a lot. He’s a hard trader, for sure. That makes him the best merchant on Jakku. Don’t even bother trading with the others. They might offer better prices sometimes, but they can’t keep it up for long. With Unkar, the work is steady.

He knows more than anyone and he’s taught me a lot about the machines we scavenge. When he’s in a good mood he’ll teach me more too — repair work for instance. I love repairing things. He’s even let me work on his pride and joy, an old Corellian freighter. I don’t know why he likes it so much. It’s vintage.

When I was a kid, I used to enjoy sitting in the cockpit of it wearing an old Rebel helmet I found and playing that I was really a Rebellion pilot. So maybe Unkar has his own dreams about that freighter.

People are scared of Unkar Plutt because he’ll get some big guys to rough up anyone who crosses him. I’ve been able to beat them in a fight since I finished growing, because they’re pretty slow. So I don’t worry too much about that. See, a couple of times I did things that annoyed Unkar and he sent them to “teach me a lesson”. I managed to keep ahead of them long enough to prove to Unkar that my way of doing things worked, and that was the end of it. If you keep standing up to them, they give up.

People complain about the way he changes the prices he pays us. He says it’s because Galactic markets change so quickly. I know he’s lying about that, in a way, but in another way he’s not. He has a commlink to talk to people on Ponemah and Ogem. Sometimes he hears news from them that makes him nervous, and it’s hard for nervous people to be generous. When he’s feeling unhappy about things, he gives you a price we both know isn’t fair. But he can’t help the way he feels about Galactic events. He’s travelled a lot and I guess he has worries about things that the rest of us can’t imagine.

He is grouchy a lot of the time, but I think he suffers a lot because he’s a Crolute, and every day he spends out of salt water is torture for him. That makes Jakku just about the worst place in the Galaxy for him!

I’m very lucky to be a human on Jakku. There aren’t many of us. Fish-people like Unkar Plutt have a terrible time of it, of course, but even Dybrintheans like Athgar Heece, who doesn’t mind the heat, can’t get around without a breather helmet, and a lot of the others are weighed down by a whole load of survival gear. Us humans are light and quick and we stand the heat. I think we’re pretty well adapted for life here.

I don’t want to sound like I think I’m special for being human. Everyone’s got their strengths and weaknesses, and when you get to know all the different kinds of people that live at Niima Outpost you realise that we’re all just trying to get by in the world, in our different ways. It’s one of the things that makes it so interesting living here. Though some people are just bad to the core; once you understand them you know you should give them no quarter because they won’t give you any.

It’s a good thing I can pick up languages easily. It’s one of the things I do. If I meet a new kind of person, I sort of try and reach behind their eyes when they talk and after a while their words make sense to me. I can’t explain it better than that.

You can’t usually do that with droids, so I don’t really know how I learned to understand them! Except once in a while you’ll meet a droid that is a person too. People don’t believe me, but it’s true. It feels very obvious to me, when a droid is a person. I think it’s terrible that people treat them all like non-people. But I guess if they really can’t tell the difference between the ones that are and the ones that aren’t, they don’t realise they’re doing something bad by memory-wiping them. I wish they wouldn’t though.

It’s not true that Jakku is all desert. At the poles, there is water - oceans of it! But it’s all hidden away under a thick salt crust for most of the year. Twice a year the wind patterns get violent enough to break up the salt, and the heat pulls the water up into the air and over towards us, and it rains. Rain is incredible — one of my favourite things on Jakku. You’d be amazed at the things that burst out of the ground and grow like mad for a couple of weeks every year. The colours almost hurt your eyes! But even more than rain, which I’ve seen every year, I would love to see the great white salt-bergs break up in the polar thaw. Apparently they sparkle, and roar like the biggest engine you ever heard, only different. An old spacer described it to me.

One day I’ll get there. I’ve got an old land-speeder I built myself. That makes me the luckiest young person on Jakku, for sure. How many other kids get to fly around on something like that at my age? It’s pretty funny-looking but it’s always worked really well for me. One day I’ll save up enough fuel to go on a long, long trip and explore more of Jakku.

Jakku is really beautiful, though it took me a long time to see that. The sand catches the light in so many colours, changing from all shades of red and orange to the softest gold and brown. Then at midday there’s no colour, exactly, but the sun dances and pulses like the greatest power you can imagine. It takes your breath away. The dunes shift, little by little, and there is no end to the patterns they make. When the sunrise catches the tops of the dunes, it is a sight as beautiful as anything in the Galaxy. I am sure of that.

Then if you get a sandstorm, you’ll come out of your shelter a few days later and everything’s moved! But it’s just as pretty. Of course, after a sandstorm you generally have to go round fixing a few things that shouldn’t have moved.

As well as travelling to see the great polar saltberg thaw, there are many wonderful and mysterious things on Jakku that I’d like to visit. Of course I’ve seen the remains of the Empire research station — everyone was in a hurry to scavenge that first, and I’m sure there were fortunes made by the people who got there first. There’s not much left to see now. But there’s also places like Tuanuul Village in Kelvin Ravine, where they have a big vaporator cistern. I’d like to see how that works. I’ve heard they have enough water to lie down in! They keep it underground, of course.

The research station was built because there’s some good topography in hyperspace around here, which has made Jakku important for space travel, even though there has never been much on the surface before that big space battle turned it into such a valuable junkyard. A spacer told me that, too.

Long before the Empire — before any of the Empires that anyone knows about — some mysterious race built the Beam Line right around the equator. People call it the Beam Line but nobody knows what it’s for. It might be for mapping spacetime, or something to do with the hyperspace anomalies around here. There’s a big installation orbiting the edges of our system that always aligns with the Beam Line. Anyway, what you see now is a line of rings standing on tall poles half buried in the dunes, right around the planet. Nobody’s managed to scavenge those. I’d love to line my speeder up with the centre of those rings and race right around the equator!

I’m definitely one of the luckiest people on Jakku. Everyone says I have “the nose” and it’s true, I always seem to find good scrap even in places other scavengers have worked over for years. I just sort of know where there’s something they’ve missed.

I’ve even managed to find things like a whole hull compartment full of copper windings in time for Coppermas. That was incredibly lucky because we have superstitions about that kind of thing. At Niima Outpost we usually celebrate for a whole ten-day between Coppermas and Leadtide. It was more copper than I knew what to do with. Unkar sold me some extra food treats I could share with the other scavengers, and we had the best feast ever. Even Unkar came out of his bunker to join in that night. I don’t think he went as far as dancing, but he was in the best mood I’ve ever seen him in.

Teguan and her family are the humans I know best at Niima Outpost. It’s a good thing that when my family left me here, Teguan was here, because she has a huge family so I guess that made up for not having my own. I mean, Unkar Plutt was my guardian but Teguan’s family showed me how to live here. They could often afford to feed me, though they had eight children of their own. Her husband Misrah ran the solar smelter. He was a powerful man around these parts, before he died in the raid that wrecked the smelter. I don’t know how Teguan found time to keep an eye on me when I was little. She’s really old — her face is wrinkled all over— so I don’t think she’d want to look after any more kids now.

Her children have all left Jakku now and some of them have their own children now. One of them, Lissa, lives in a palace! That proves you don’t have to be a nobody just because you come from Jakku.

Some of them went offworld to go to school. Apparently at school you can sit all day and learn about things. I didn’t used to think that sitting around was any way to learn things, but since I’ve grown up I run around less and think more. I like to sit outside my AT-AT (did I tell you I live in my own AT-AT? How lucky am I?) and put on my Rebel helmet, and think about things. Maybe that sounds silly but anyway that’s what I like to do.

I had other friends too. Chindeep was a young Toydarian. We used to play together all the time, exploring some of the nearer wrecks. His family operated boom-fly hives. When you open up an old wreck, sometimes it’s been very well sealed or some kind of stasis field has been in operation, and you still have a lot of dead bodies that are bad to work around and kind of disgusting. Boom-flies go in and eat up all the bodies, and when they’re done, all at once they explode out of the wreck with a big “BOOM!”. It’s an incredible sight. They have these gauzy wings, so you can imagine what they look like, rising into the sky like a great whirling rainbow cloud. The Toydarians have some way of calling them in or herding them back to their travelling hive. And afterwards the ship is completely clean and safe to enter. Chindeep says it’s pretty awful if you have to go in while the boom-flies are still working. He had to do that once or twice. I never went with him.

When I die I think I’d like to have the boom-flies clean me up. I’d love to end up as a coloured veil against the sky.

Chindeep and I used to climb around on things, and of course he could fly. I used to jump up and fly with him sometimes. Or it was more like I was doing super-long jumps. Say if you had to leap from one stanchion to another in a ship’s hold, I’d do that. At least, I remember I did. It was something that just happened. We didn’t tell anyone about it. Then later when we did tell people, nobody believed us. Maybe I’m remembering it wrong. It seems like it really did happen. I haven’t done it in a long time, so maybe it’s not true that I flew like that.

Sometimes on those old hulks you’ll be in the crew quarters and there are pictures and holocubes that show you other places and other people. You can learn a lot about people by the things left behind in their cabins. It’s almost like having friends.

Some of those holocubes show some weird things. Chindeep and I would play a game of imagining the strangest place that could ever be. “Imagine a place that was covered in water the way Jakku is covered in sand,” he said once. I wondered if that much water would move like our dunes do, only faster. Big water dunes. The thought made me laugh, but then I kept dreaming about it. A planet covered in water! The planet in my dreams was even stranger though because it had pointy bits of land sticking up that are called islands, apparently. Or mountains. I’m not sure. Jakku doesn’t have either. In my dreams it was always Rain Week, because the land was green.

Chindeep and his family left when I was ten or so. They’d cleaned out all the known wrecks with their boom-flies, so it was time to take the hives and find work on another planet.

I wish I could remember my family, but I can’t. I don’t remember being a baby, or anything. But Teguan says I was about five when I came here. She says they must have loved me a lot to have taken so much trouble hiding me here, where nobody bad would find me.

You’d think Unkar could tell me something about my family, but he says he can barely tell one human from another. They had the normal number of arms and legs and heads, he says. They were definitely hiding me here though, and they said they’d be back one day.

He thinks they said my name was Rey. He might have heard it wrong, he says.

I guess I’ll find out when they come back.

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Before I could write a story about Rey, I needed to understand her better. That was hard. Did I even know anyone like that?
> 
> As it turns out, I do. A girl from a tiny backwater with a family struggling with drug and alcohol issues and mental health problems, whose parents couldn't raise her. She burst into our lives for a couple of years before her raw talent propelled her out of our orbit and into a successful career. She could have succeeded anywhere.
> 
> She loves people and people love her. Charisma, the ability to seize happiness, the courage to give anything a go no matter how little her previous life has prepared her, no self-pity and a clear sense moral certainty about the best course of action - she's the Rey I know in real life.
> 
> It didn't matter who she was speaking to, how important or powerful or experienced or famous they were, she would always tell them, with great confidence, what her name was and where she was from.


End file.
